"If you want to raise kids where they are less impatient, able to smell the roses and delay gratification, then you should choose to live in a neighbourhood where there is a lower concentration of fast food restaurants," explained Sanford DeVoe, an associate professor at University of Toronto.

Even packaged fast food is enough to raise people's impatience, researchers said."We think about fast food as saving us time and freeing us up to do the things that we want to do," DeVoe noted.

"But because it instigates this sense of impatience, there are a whole set of activities where it becomes a barrier to our enjoyment of them," he added.

The study was published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.